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How to Find Out if Your Job is Right for You
Is my job helping me fulfil my potential? Do I have the opportunity to use my talents every day? Is my work engaging my strengths? These are the questions that we ask ourselves from time to time and are central to our experience in the world of work. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review picks up on these questions, with some advice on how to reach our potential. Writing in the latest issue, Robert Kaplan shares his view that it’s important not only to identify our strengths, but also to become aware of our weaknesses. A previous article here on Talent Talk (Drucker: Focus on Strengths) stressed the importance of strengths and how few people are aware of their own strengths, let alone their weaknesses. Robert Kaplan gives some useful tips on how to do this: through asking your team members in a structured way. You could almost call this approach ‘an informal 360° feedback session’.
This is nothing new, and we recommend the approach wholeheartedely. The problem with asking others is that you’re going to get at best behavioural feedback, and not really feedback about your strengths. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet ‘ We know what we are, but not what we may be’. This tension is very often the cause of stress and unproductive behaviours simply because we may feel we are not fulfilling our potential, or even what that potential is. It’s important to be clear about this. Our behaviours are so often an effect of our talents being used or neglected (and the combination of our talents with skills and knowledge, our strengths), rather than an end in themselves. So let’s say that your team members have given you feedback that you are often impatient or frustrated - recieved wisdom would be to try to take actions to ‘fix’ those weaknesses. This may be helpful sometimes. But usually these behaviours are due to an underlying cause: that you are not working in areas that play to your strengths. In this case it’s important to treat the cause, not the symptoms. This brings us back to the importance of identifying our true strengths, which we discover through our talents and natural abilities. The question is: how do we do this? Highlands has an excellent tool which zeroes in on our natural abilities. Developed over ninety years, the Highlands Ability Battery is scientific and offers a validated way of identifying these ‘underlying causes’, which are our talents. What is great about the Battery is that you can also find out whether your job is really right for you. It’s as simple as this: once you have completed the Battery, you will get a set of scores which tells you which natural abilities you have. A ‘low’ score in any one of these abilities is an indicator of an ability in another area. A Report follows, and this gives recommendations as to what kind of professions and activities you are likely to excel at. I have been able to help people, using Highlands, identify exactly the kind of activities that play to their strengths - and also those that constantly work their weaknesses. Removing the latter and enhancing the former is the central key to job satisfaction. If someone has more than three weaknesses they do on a daily basis, then the job is not right for them. Usually, it’s not a case of changing job, but remoulding it to the person’s strengths, then managing out the weaknesses. But if the job’s very structure plays to a person’s weaknesses then the likelihood is that a change of focus is needed. In many cases I have heard the ‘negative behaviours’ then becoming a thing of the past. This is because our talents are essentially our synapses - the hardwiring of our nervous system - and if we are in harmony with these synapses then a lot of stress is removed. Highlands is a scientific approach to finding out if our job match is strong. I always find it fascinating when I read these articles in places like the Harvard Business Review, but it’s always worth bearing in mind that with Highlands there is a very simple solution.
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Article Tags: Career, Management, Career Advice, Leadership, Job Satisfaction, Talents, Talent, Career Management, Natural Abilities, Talent Talk, Talent Blog Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/career-management-articles/how-to-find-out-if-your-job-is-right-for-you-488920.html About the Author:
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